RESOLUTION: How The Gospel Is Like This Freedom Caucus New Year’s Tweet

It’s a safe bet that with the busyness of life and the holiday preparations, many of our readers didn’t know there even WAS a Freedom Caucus tweet. But there was.

It would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Freedom Caucus that their New Year’s resolution centered on cutting federal spending.

House GOP’s New Year Resolution Must Be Cutting Spending pic.twitter.com/gPZLF60kwG

— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) December 29, 2023

Like so many other New Year’s resolutions, this one speaks to a basic assumption. Just because people KNOW the right thing to do doesn’t mean we act on that knowledge.

Inherent in any resolution is an admission: the choices we are making now will not lead us to the life we REALLY want, even though these are a lot of short-term-gain reasons behind making our status-quo choices.

If we really want to live that better life we will have to make new choices that align with that better life.

But you’ve probably noticed that we go through this very same pattern. Every. Single. Year.

Politicians on the national level sound their dire warnings and call for change, only to watch another year go by with no progress on delivering on said promises.

It’s easy to point fingers, but most of us are no better than the politicians whose hypocrisy we mock.

Every year, we too have a to-do-list of choices we’ve been putting off. We already know that changes we ought to make; changes that would make a massive change in the quality of the lives we live.

Some would master their body to get in shape. Others would master their time more effectively. Or master a new skill. Or get better control of their money.

But we all have an internal resistance to making any of the changes we know we should make, don’t we?

There’s that one dark part of us that KNOWS the right thing to do and even knows how doing that right thing will pay off in the long run and yet — and yet — that part of us STILL had to be dragged kicking and screaming.

How often does it take a crisis to break that momentum to shake us out of our complacency? A medical scare. A job loss. A relationship breakdown. Or even failing your own expectations of yourself in a deeply personal and embarrassing way.

The Freedom Caucus is pointing to our runaway debt crisis and trying to wake Americans up to a crisis of our own.

But how is that like the gospel?

In just the same way an oncologist won’t talk treatment options until the seriousness of the diagnosis has been properly explained.

Nobody would willingly zap their body with radiation and eat toxic chemicals by the handful unless they were convinced that the cost of doing nothing seriously outweighed the discomfort of enduring the treatment.

Likewise…

Jesus came with a simple message: repent, for the kingdom of God has come near. He was very good at peeling back the areas of someone’s life that were out of step with a heartfelt walk with God and left his hearers with a choice of more of the same, or to step into a whole new kind of life played by different rules. (More on what that repentance actually meant here.)

Just like our national debt question — living this new kind of life is a desirable goal that will take a different set of choices than the ones we’ve been used to.

Jesus is kind and gentle with people who come to Him knowing their way isn’t working. The people he puts on blast are the ones who had something ELSE they were holding onto more tightly than God himself.

He loves them enough to tell the drowning man to let go of the anchor that threatens to destroy him.

Whether that OTHER thing was money, prestige, power, or even something honorable like family connections, or even religious devotion for its own sake.

Christ made it VERY clear his way would require singleness of heart.

It would require a choice.

And just like the Freedom Caucus tweet would say of the debt, not making a choice IS a choice. A serious choice with consequences of its own.

Does that consequence include negative implications in the afterlife? Of course.

But long before that final reckoning, there is another kind of loss. The opportunity cost of not knowing Christ in the here and now.

The first step down that road is knowing who He really is, not the pop-culture version, not the stuffy Church-lady version, but Christ as he presents Himself.

Check out ClashRadio for more wit and wisdom from ClashDaily’s Big Dawg. While you’re at it, here’s his latest book:

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